


Sometimes It Comes Back

by thewitch0fthewilds (gossamerstarsxx)



Series: Not With Haste [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Panic Attacks, mild Self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 05:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4947943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamerstarsxx/pseuds/thewitch0fthewilds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t know what triggered it, has never seen this happen to her before, but he knows from experience what the warning signs are.</p>
<p>[Prompt fill for Cullen calming Lavellan after she suffers a panic attack.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes It Comes Back

**Author's Note:**

> [fen-harel-enansal](http://fen-harel-enansal.tumblr.com) sent me a fic prompt:
> 
> "Lavellan/Cullen angst/hurt-comfort. Cullen knows the warning signs of a panic attack, so when Lavellan stumbles out of the war room he quickly follows her and pulls her into an empty room to try to calm her down."
> 
> I answered with ~3k words of angst, told from Cullen’s POV. Sometimes I get carried away.
> 
> [Aislin Lavellan's Bio](http://saiyanshewolf.tumblr.com/post/111572251253/artwork-by-the-lovely-peacockzzz-info-template) & [Aislin Lavellan's Tumblr Tag](http://saiyanshewolf.tumblr.com/tagged/aislin_lavellan)
> 
> **Warnings** : Detailed flashback symptoms; detailed panic attack symptoms; mild self-harm; heavily implied rape, but no descriptive details.

Josephine is talking, briefing them all on the guests attending some affair or other that will require the Inquisitor to at least show her face. Cullen isn’t paying much attention. He knows that Josie is invaluable, knows that he could never do what she does, but he always finds his mind wandering when she begins discussing the nobility and the various ways in which their fragile egos must be coddled. He also knows that if _he’s_ bored, the Inquisitor in question is very likely trying to refrain from jumping out the window. 

He glances at Aislin across the war table, and sure enough, she looks as if she would rather fight a dragon with her bare hands than have to stand there for another minute pretending to care about the human lords Josephine is describing. Usually by this point in the morning meetings Aislin would be playing with one of her daggers, twirling it between her fingers like a baton and heedless of its sharp edges, but both Cassandra and Josephine had forbidden her from fiddling with her weapons in the war room. She _did_ have a tendency to throw them at the map when asking questions about an area - she’d nearly stabbed Cullen between the legs the very first day they met doing that, as she pointed out the place she’d lived in the Free Marches.

The memory makes him smile a little; Aislin must see it, because she catches his gaze across the table and smirks a bit before rolling her eyes. Cullen grins down at the floor, not wanting Cassandra to see and scold them like schoolchildren (he’s accepted that Leliana, who sees everything, will be teasing him about Aislin for the rest of his days).

“...And Ser Tremaine from the Free Marches will be there as well. The Tremaines own a great deal of land in the eastern Marches - some of which I believe borders on the area where you lived with your clan, incidentally. Still, how he received an invitation is beyond me. The elder Ser Tremaine, this one’s father, was boorish brute, and when he was murdered while hunting a few years ago, there were few who mourned his loss,” Josephine says, and Cullen looks up at her, the name shaking him out of his daydreams. He remembers hearing about this, though he had had so many other things on his mind in Kirkwall that he isn’t sure why the murder of some rude lord so far in the east has stuck in his mind over the years.

“It was a nasty affair, and the family did try to conceal the details,” Josephine continues, her nose wrinkling up in distaste. “But when a lord is...well... _castrated_ and killed on his own land, word gets around. It is not the official story, mind you, so best not to mention it to Ser Tremaine at all, should you have the misfortune to be introduced. I hear he's little better than his father…”

_Ah_. Cullen shudders at the thought. _That’s why it stuck in my head_. He opens his mouth to mention that he’d heard of the scandal, hoping that Josephine will think he’s been listening the whole time, but before he can speak he hears Aislin suck in her breath as if she’s been stung. He and the others turn to look at her, and his heart skips out of rhythm for a moment when he sees her face. 

He doesn’t know what triggered it, has never seen this happen to her before, but he knows from experience what the warning signs are.

The color drains from her cheeks and her eyes grow wide, glassy, pupils narrowing down to pinpricks. Her chest is heaving and he can actually hear how shallow and erratic her breath has become. Her arms are still crossed but her fingers dig deep into her flesh as her muscles tense under her clothes. Worst of all, her top teeth begin sinking deeper and deeper into her bottom lip; a bright bead of blood wells up like a tear, and Cullen immediately nudges Leliana's booted foot with his own, clearing his throat. She gives an imperceptible nod as Cassandra and Josephine look at him, taking their eyes off Aislin before her discomfort has entirely registered.

"This affair isn't for another month, Josephine, and it is nearly noon; surely some of this can wait until later?" Cullen asks.

Aislin - blank eyed, lip bleeding - begins to back away, toward the door. Her shoulder slams into the stone wall on her way out, and Leliana picks up Cullen's ruse for him just as Aislin stumbles out of sight.

"He's right, Josie," Leliana says, "Truthfully, I’m famished. Let Cassandra and I go over this with you while we eat, and we can help you..."

Cullen doesn’t hear the rest. He’s out the door as soon as Josephine and Cassandra are focused on Leliana, and he nearly trips over Aislin in his hurry. She’s on her knees almost in the middle of the hallway, her scarred, dark hands clutched deep into the roots of her hair. She’s breathing through her mouth in short, wheezing gasps that Cullen knows all too well. He slips in front of her and crouches down to her level, hoping that he can ground her a little before the others come out of the war room.

Instead she recoils from him as if he were a snake and scrambles to her feet. Her eyes are wide with terror and hatred, but they are also a thousand miles away.

Cullen recognizes a flashback when he sees it. He stands up slowly, not wanting to startle her. He knows that she isn’t here, not really, but when she goes for her daggers he doesn’t hesitate to grab her wrists. He knows it might make matters worse, and it does - she snatches against his grip, twisting her body like a cat that doesn’t want to be held - but to let Aislin get her hands on her weapons in a state like this would be dangerous. He moves quickly, and although he tries to be gentle as he shifts her wrists to one hand and pulls her into the storage room off the hall, she still curses him a slew of Elvhen and Common. He doesn’t understand most of the Elvhen, but he does understand the last thing she hisses at him before she falls silent:

“Get your filthy hands off me, _shem!_ ”

He tries not to let it bother him, tries to forget that she hasn’t called him shem in months, not since the night of the storm, but the venom in her voice stings nonetheless. He ignores it, ignores it the way he has learned to ignore the pain of lyrium withdrawal, shoving it far to the back of his mind and focusing on what must be done in the moment. He divests her of her daggers - not without some difficulty - and sets them on a high, dusty shelf before releasing his hold on her wrists and cupping her scowling face in his hands, tilting it upward so that she can see him clearly.

The little storage room is colder than the war room or the hall, but not cold enough to warrant the way Aislin’s clammy skin breaks out into gooseflesh, nor the violence of her shivering. She claws at his hands once, but her resistance is half-hearted now, and some of the distance is fading from her eyes.

"I'm right here, lovedove," Cullen assures her, keeping his voice as soft and measured as possible. "It is only me, I promise. Tell me how I can help you."

Her breath quickens; her chest heaves beneath the straps of her dagger sheaths and her hands fly to the buckles that hold them across her back, but she's shaking so badly that she can't unhook them herself. Cullen does it for her, setting them to the side as Aislin snatches open the buttons of her coat. She shrugs out of it and flings it down, inhaling deeply as she does so, then collapses into the depths of an old, sheet-covered couch in her sleeveless undershirt, propping her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.

Cullen pauses for a moment, listening to her breathe; she is inhaling deeply but exhaling too quickly, and the rhythm is too erratic to be calming. Before he can say anything she breathes out into a sob...and then, to his horror, cuts off the sound by digging her teeth into her own forearm with the viciousness of a mad wolf.

"Aislin!"

He's on his knees in front of her in an instant, coaxing her arm out of her teeth and cradling her face in his hands as he fights not to show his own concern and confusion. Seeing that will only upset her more, he knows...but in truth he is deeply unsettled. Aislin's self-control is well known throughout the Inquisition, and seeing her fall apart so completely, so _suddenly_ , shakes him to his core.

"Please don't do that, love," he murmurs, but it still comes out sounding like a plea, like begging. "Please. I am here with you, tell me how to help you, lovedove."

She looks at him as if she has only just now registered his presence in the room. Her wide, bewildered eyes focus on him at last, and she clutches his wrists in her dark hands the way a drowning man might clutch a rope thrown from a boat.

"Cullen," she mumbles, "Cullen, talk to me, just talk, don't let me think, I need something real, don't let me think about it..."

Her eyes squeeze shut and she holds his wrists tighter, choking on another sob that instead turns into a frustrated, fearful half-scream. Cullen gives himself no time to think, no time to consider the best words, no time to worry about embarrassing himself; he swipes away the tears on her tattooed cheeks and leans in to kiss her forehead, and then he starts talking.

"I want to take you to Honnleath," he says, surprising himself somewhat. "Mia would love you, Rosalie would be so shy but so excited to meet you, and Branson would probably try to steal you away; I think I'd let him try, just to see the look on his face when you shut him up, and I know Mia would try to feed you every hour, I can hear her now, scolding me about how you're no bigger than a bird, and never mind that you're the leader of the Inquisition--"

Aislin opens her eyes. She still has a death grip on his wrists and he can feel her trembling, but her eyes are dry, clear, and _there_ ; she's listening to him, focused on him, and Cullen keeps talking.

"You know that Mia has been begging me to come home for years, and I never have, because I never felt I had a enough of a reason," he says, tucking a stray lock of dark, messy hair behind the ragged points of her right ear. "But now I do, I want them to know you. I want to see you and Mia get to know one another, befriend each other, I want to see Branson sweat when you twirl your daggers and ask him to repeat himself, I want to see all of the admiration and awe in Rosalie's eyes when she looks at you. Mia said in her last letter that Rosalie asks about the Inquisitor all the time, she's so excited that the leader of the Inquisition is a woman. Apparently she's even excited that she’s a Dalish woman, too, Mia says she’s become more of a pest than I was at the chantry, reading all the history books and asking all sorts of questions about elves that make the sisters and the Templars both terribly uncomfortable.”

Aislin laughs, and the sound of it is so short, so bitter and rueful in the quiet of the storage room that Cullen knows he has somehow spoken badly. She pushes his hands away from her and draws back, crossing her arms over her chest and refusing to meet his eyes. She bites her lip again, heedless of the wound she’s already inflicted there; Cullen can sense the panic welling up inside of her again, like floodwaters battering a dam.

“Your sister needs a better role model,” she says, and her voice is high, thin - near to breaking.

"I can think of none better than you, lovedove." Cullen takes her hand again, and though she lets him hold it, none of the tension fades from her body. She tries to meet his gaze, but her eyes keep shifting elsewhere.

"I mean it, Cullen," she says at length, her voice beginning to waver. "Your sister...she should be looking up to you. Cassandra. Leliana. Hell, _Varric_. Just not...not me."

"You're the only person in all of Thedas who can close the Rifts, Aislin," Cullen says quietly. "And you've used that to help people. You've used that to help _your_ people. I find that more than worthy of admiration."

"I didn't _ask_ for this," she scowls, and pulls her hand out of his. It's her marked hand, the one that she always keeps covered with a fingerless glove unless there are rifts to be closed. She stares down at it, flexing her scarred fingers, glaring at the green glow between them; he sees her eyes begin to fade again as she falls backward into her mind, and before he can act she clenches her marked hand into a shaking fist and drives it hard into her thigh.

“I didn’t ask for it!” she hisses. Her voice is desperate, raw with revulsion and despair, and Cullen moves to sit beside her, pulling her into his lap and curling one hand behind her neck. He draws her close, close enough that their foreheads touch, twines the fingers of his other hand with hers as tightly as he dares...and she breaks.

She begins to shake, twisting her marked hand deep into the fur of his mantle, and words begin to out of her mouth in a frantic rush that Cullen doesn’t understand, not completely:

“I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t, not this, not the mark, not the Inquisition, and not him, not that, Dread Wolf take him _so why did he follow me here?_ ”

Her breathing grows more ragged yet and she makes a low, strangled sound in her throat, twisting her fingers tighter into the fur, clinging to his hand so tightly that it's painful, and Maker save them both, he doesn’t know what she means, but he knows what she needs, knows the suffocating trap she's caught in like he knows his own name; he squeezes her hand gently, rubs soft circles along the nape of her neck with his fingertips, and he talks.

"Look at me, love," he says, sounding more firm and certain than he feels. "Whoever he is, you're safe here. You're safe. I promise you that."

"I know, Cullen, that's the problem is that I _know_ ," she hisses through gritted teeth. "I know I'm safe from him, Cullen, because _I killed him_."

Her words hang in the air for a long, eternal moment - Cullen wants to speak but he has no words, no context - 

She begins to laugh. There is no mirth in it; it's pure panic. Cullen remembers laughing like that, long ago.

"I killed him!" Her smile is terrible, miserable. "I killed him, so I'd be safe, so others would be safe, but I'll never be safe from my own head, I'll never be safe from what he did to me."

Cold apprehension springs to life somewhere in Cullen's chest, spreading until his skin crawls. He holds her closer, tighter, and her sick laughter ebbs into the area of tears.

"I thought I was past this, I thought it was finally over but Josie said the name and it all came back, it all came back like it was happening again, and I hate this, I hate it!"

She is still shaking in his arms, but now she isn't the only one; Cullen can feel his shoulders trembling as she speaks, revealing things about herself that he had never known, never imagined.

"I hate this," she repeats; she is speaking too quickly, fighting against the tears. "I hate being afraid and I hate being weak and Creators save me I hate myself, I should have fought more I should have tried harder to get away I shouldn't have let it happen but I did and I killed him for it but I can't kill my memories, I can't kill a name, and Josie didn't know, _they can’t know, I can’t be weak, I can’t_ -"

Her voice shatters as a sob wrenches its way up from her throat. She buries her face in his chest, every muscle in her body taut and hard as stone, and she cries.

It is a deep, purging kind of crying, the kind so intense that it drains the whole body to exhaustion, and Cullen holds her close through it all. He does not understand, not completely...but he understands _enough_ , and so he talks.

"I'm right here," he mumbles occasionally; "It's all right, lovedove," and "I've got you." He tells her he loves her, presses his lips into her dark hair, lets her clutch his hand in a grip so desperate that the bones of his knuckles begin to ache, lets her weep herself to weariness in his arms.

After a long while she begins to slow down, and soon after falls quiet. Cullen leans down to place another kiss on the top of her head only to find that she is already looking up at him, eyes bloodshot and swollen and miserable, black kohl in streaks down her cheeks.

"I'm sorry," she says. Her voice is dull with despair, a knock on the lid of a coffin.

"You do not need to be," Cullen responds gently, pressing his lips to her forehead instead.

"I called you _shem_ ," she mumbles, "I'm sorry. I'll explain. I promise."

"Only if you want to, love," he says. "You don't have to explain anything."

"I _do_ want to," she replies. "Not now. Not today. But I do. But...right now I want..."

"Mm?"

"Can we...can we just stay here for awhile?" She plucks absently at the fur of his mantle, then smiles half heartedly and adds, "Maybe nap?"

Cullen thinks of Cassandra and Josephine, who no doubt expect to resume the day’s duties after lunch; he thinks of the letters he has to write, the plans of attack and defense he must make, the training he must oversee, and then begins unbuckling his vambraces without hesitation.

Aislin's smile widens ever so slightly. He loosens his greaves and toes off his boots; her cold hands snake under his mantle and surcoat to unbuckle his armor, and he makes a rather undignified snickering sound as her fingers brush against ticklish skin.

Before long, his armor is stacked next to her coat; he's lying on the couch on his back with Aislin stretched out on top of him, his mantle draped over them both. He has one arm behind his head and the other around the small of Aislin's back.

She kisses him, her lips soft and sleepy and slow against his; Cullen kisses her back with lazy warmth, stroking her silky hair. She's only half-awake when she pecks his lips one last time, mumbling "Thank you," before tucking herself close under his chin.

"Always, my love."

She is already asleep; within another ten minutes, Cullen is too.


End file.
